Trump's blog has staggeringly small audience - The Washington Post

His “From the Desk of Donald Trump” blog, which he and his team have promoted heavily in TV interviews and social media posts, has in the last week been shared to Facebook on average fewer than 2,000 times a day — a staggering drop from last year, when his Facebook page fielded tens of millions of comments, shares and other interactions every week, according to data from the social media analytics firm BuzzSumo and the Facebook-owned content-tracking tool CrowdTangle.Trump, who has long boasted about his ability to draw an audience online and dominate the conversation, has complained that his statements are getting nowhere near as much as attention as they once did, people in his orbit have said. Facebook’s daily active user base in the United States and Canada hasn’t changed since Trump’s ban, remaining at 195 million during the first three months of the year, while Twitter’s actually grew by 5 million, to 38 million, company filings show.Trump’s fans and critics online were quick to note that the blog had no features for user likes, replies or reactions; no cheers or bickering in the comment sections; and no space for memes, retweets or other trappings that other sites use to spread messages to broader audiences.Trump advisers say the blog is low-quality and unimpressive and have faulted Brad Parscale, the former Trump campaign manager whose company built the site and runs the political campaign software Campaign Nucleus, for several technical glitches and inexplicable delays. But not many fans appear to be doing so: Social engagement across the Web with Trump’s blog, including reactions and shares on Facebook and Twitter, plummeted from 159,000 interactions on its first day to fewer than 30,000 the second and haven’t crossed 15,000 interactions any day since, BuzzSumo data show.Exiled from social media mainstream, Trump and his followers will find life different at the extreme corners of the WebParscale insisted Trump’s website is “highly trafficked,” saying the number of page views so far in May is 28 million, according to his company’s internal data.Trump’s continued exile from the primary social media platforms and his treatment by Big Tech, in their words, have become key issues for party stalwarts and are likely to become talking points in 2022, according to internal Republican polling data and operatives who have met to discuss how to campaign on them.But there is little evidence, despite the polemics, that people are talking about him online, despite his blog being promoted as a “beacon of freedom” in recent Trump appearances on conservative talk-radio shows and friendly TV interviews.Trump posts several times a day to the blog in the same rambling style that won him attention on Twitter for years, berating his enemies, cheering his cheerleaders and bemoaning how little credit he believes he gets: “Just a mention please!” he said last week in a post about vaccines. On Twitter, data from the online-analytics firm Zignal Labs shows, mentions of him have cratered to an average of about 4 million a week, the lowest since 2016.Trump’s blog shows none of the technical sophistication his team would need to build a new social media site.